At least according to the server page if I am reading it right, and I have two of them. One has been pending for weeks and I wonder if I will ever receive credit for it, not that it matters a whole lot. On the other hand, the pending user of the other one shows his CPU put in 188,755 seconds on it so if it just disappears – ouch! ;-). At least it will be interesting to see which way it falls.

At least according to the server page if I am reading it right, and I have two of them. One has been pending for weeks and I wonder if I will ever receive credit for it, not that it matters a whole lot. On the other hand, the pending user of the other one shows his CPU put in 188,755 seconds on it so if it just disappears – ouch! ;-). At least it will be interesting to see which way it falls.

I had one for a while, but my host finally sent it back a few days ago.

____________DavidSitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Now only 60 left out in the wild. Will the world as we know it, come to an end, when we reach zero AP 505's?
____________I'm only running one computer. Using 2 cores of an old Q8200 CPU for CPU tasks, and 2 cores feeding a single Mid-range GPU, ATI HD7870.
Look at the RAC folks, and ask yourselves why it beats so many multi GPU monster computers :-)

Now only 60 left out in the wild. Will the world as we know it, come to an end, when we reach zero AP 505's?

It's an exponential drop-off, so the fewer left the longer it will take.

I estimate the last one will come back sometime in mid December 2012...

Exponential decay is only valid when considering large numbers of events (e.g. uranium atoms decaying in a nuclear reactor). In this case, as the number of results in the field gets smaller, the fit to exponential decay will get less and less good. In addition, a host can only have a task for a limited time before it times out and someone else gets to process it. All AP5 tasks still in the field must have deadlines in May, so I doubt we will still be waiting for them to reach 0 in December.
____________

Now only 60 left out in the wild. Will the world as we know it, come to an end, when we reach zero AP 505's?

It's an exponential drop-off, so the fewer left the longer it will take.

I estimate the last one will come back sometime in mid December 2012...

Exponential decay is only valid when considering large numbers of events (e.g. uranium atoms decaying in a nuclear reactor). In this case, as the number of results in the field gets smaller, the fit to exponential decay will get less and less good. In addition, a host can only have a task for a limited time before it times out and someone else gets to process it. All AP5 tasks still in the field must have deadlines in May, so I doubt we will still be waiting for them to reach 0 in December.

We had a similar countdown at NumberFields@Home recently, and when we'd got down to 40 tasks, their Eric assured us that "all the remaining pesky WUs have been issued to 'reliable' hosts". Even so, I still got a resend several days later from a host which turned out not to be so reliable after all.....

I don't know whether 'our' Eric has used, or considered using, the facility for accelerating retries by using only reliable hosts: I rather suspect not. So, it could still be a while yet.

... a host can only have a task for a limited time before it times out and someone else gets to process it. All AP5 tasks still in the field must have deadlines in May, so I doubt we will still be waiting for them to reach 0 in December.

Timeouts don't count toward maximum errors, so theoretically a WU could keep getting sent and timing out over and over indefinitely. Not statistically likely, though.

____________DavidSitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

That's what we are all wondering. I have 4 of those and there appear to be around 12,000 in total. The hope is that once AP5 in the field drops to zero, the good guys at Berkeley will reactivate the code that is supposed to validate WUs like that (returned after 2 other results validated but within the allocated time) to clear the system and we will all get our credit.
____________

We had a similar countdown at NumberFields@Home recently, and when we'd got down to 40 tasks, their Eric assured us that "all the remaining pesky WUs have been issued to 'reliable' hosts". Even so, I still got a resend several days later from a host which turned out not to be so reliable after all.....

I don't know whether 'our' Eric has used, or considered using, the facility for accelerating retries by using only reliable hosts: I rather suspect not. So, it could still be a while yet.

There actually IS such a feature in the Boinc server software? I thought I remembered it being floated as an idea, but did not know it really existed.

Oh, BTW, now down to 55.
____________
*********************************************
Behold the power of kitty!!

We had a similar countdown at NumberFields@Home recently, and when we'd got down to 40 tasks, their Eric assured us that "all the remaining pesky WUs have been issued to 'reliable' hosts". Even so, I still got a resend several days later from a host which turned out not to be so reliable after all.....

I don't know whether 'our' Eric has used, or considered using, the facility for accelerating retries by using only reliable hosts: I rather suspect not. So, it could still be a while yet.

There actually IS such a feature in the Boinc server software? I thought I remembered it being floated as an idea, but did not know it really existed.

We had a similar countdown at NumberFields@Home recently, and when we'd got down to 40 tasks, their Eric assured us that "all the remaining pesky WUs have been issued to 'reliable' hosts". Even so, I still got a resend several days later from a host which turned out not to be so reliable after all.....

I don't know whether 'our' Eric has used, or considered using, the facility for accelerating retries by using only reliable hosts: I rather suspect not. So, it could still be a while yet.

There actually IS such a feature in the Boinc server software? I thought I remembered it being floated as an idea, but did not know it really existed.

Cool. Would seem to be able to reduce database bloat.
Maybe it should be a standard feature. And reduce pending credits.....which many crunchers have a problem with, though it should not be.

The kitties would not mind being left out. Although almost all of my crunchers are rather trustworthy, and return few errors, the kitties' penchant for big caches would rule them out on the time of return stat.

Good feature, I think.

Meow, and thanks for the info, Richard.
____________
*********************************************
Behold the power of kitty!!

54 now. It takes time to get down just one task. Maybe by mid summer (northern hemisphere) we're at zero :-)
____________I'm only running one computer. Using 2 cores of an old Q8200 CPU for CPU tasks, and 2 cores feeding a single Mid-range GPU, ATI HD7870.
Look at the RAC folks, and ask yourselves why it beats so many multi GPU monster computers :-)